Joey Pakes and Prentiss Nelson

Nov. 30, 2014

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Michal Joey Pakes and Robert Prentiss Nelson were married Saturday in Cambridge, Mass. Sol Matthew Pakes, the bride’s brother, who became a Universal Life minister for theevent, officiated in Adolphus Busch Hall at Harvard.

The couple met at University of California, Berkeley, from which the bride received a doctoral degree in integrative biology and the groom received an M.B.A.

Mrs. Nelson, 31, is known as Joey. She graduated from Harvard, where she is a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow, studying the relationships between microbes and crustaceans in underwater cave ecosystems.

She is the daughter of Juliana R. Pakes and Ariel S. Pakes of Cambridge. The bride’s father is a professor of economics at Harvard, from which her mother retired as a project coordinator and a statistician for the Center for American Political Studies.

Mr. Nelson, 34, is known as Prentiss. He is a vice president in New York with the RBC Capital Markets branch of the Royal Bank of Canada. He works in its financial institutions group, advising companies on mergers and acquisitions. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy. From 2002 to 2008, he was in the Marine Corps, having served in Iraq as an artillery officer and leaving the service with the rank of captain.

He is the son of Sandra C. Nelson of Nashville and the late William Nelson II. The groom’s mother is a freelance writer in Nashville. His father was a partner in Gregory & Sons, an investment firm in New York.